Web Watch

Websites that aggregate a user's personal financial data and other accounts have been around for well over a decade. They started to pop up in the late 1990s as financial institutions began doing business online en masse. Once known rather disparagingly as "screen scrapers," the early versions of these sites offered convenience but at an unknown privacy and security costs. It really was a wild west that has since been mostly tamed. Users today are perfectly comfortable with online business, securely sharing personal information with trusted sources, and they're very quickly getting used to having complex financial tools on their phones..About the time aggregators started testing the waters, a lot of community banks hadn't even launched a website, much less online banking. Today it's hard to find a bank that doesn't offer online services, but now very functional and reputable aggregators like mint.com are vying to become the financial center of a customer's life. How can community banks compete with that?.One aggregator, the 2012 Webby Award winning Manilla.com, wants to partner with community banks specifically. It hasn't been an easy sell but the company's CEO, Jim Schinella, whose background includes executive positions at Yahoo! and AOL Time Warner, said Manilla is thinking very seriously about a partnership that he thinks will make sense for smaller banks.."What community banks have and what they value most about their style of banking is the trust they build with a customer," Schinella said. "We haven't rolled out the product yet, but in addition to community banks being a part of Manilla, Manilla could be also extended into the community bank. Our technology could be offered directly by the bank with a tag-line something like 'powered by Manilla'.".At the moment, Manilla doesn't work like that at all. In its model, it seeks partnerships with financial services, utility companies and any sort of company that might offer a customer an online account. The service remains free to the user while the providers pay a small fee to Manilla for delivering electronic statements to their customers, who enjoy having one place to go to when paying bills. Each provider's section of the Manilla experience provides opportunities to interact with customers. But banks have yet to get fully on board.."I've experienced this many times," said Schinella about finding banking partners. "You walk into a bank, you explain to them what Manilla is, and they feel you are being competitive with them. They think we look a lot like bank bill pay, when in fact we have nothing to do with payments. We're actually driving traffic to you and giving opportunities to reach out to customers who are looking for a convenient way to manage their lives. If we do that well they actually don't spend much time thinking about Manilla, but they do spend time with our partners. It's hard to get banks to understand that we are in no way getting between them and their customers.".This, Schinella said, is the reaction of representatives from some of the larger financial institutions, although Citibank and Bank of America have recently become Manilla partners.."Right now there's no reason why a community bank couldn't be a partner with Manilla," Schinella said. "The size really doesn't matter in that respect. When a user logs in to Manilla to pay bills, the bank has complete control over the content that is presented to their customer, somewhat like an ad server. They can present any type of information they want.".Schinella is confident that in its current form, Manilla is a great fit for smaller banks. Among other benefits customers get alerts when bills are due, and storage space for archiving statements and other financial documents. Schinella said it's a great experience.."We polled 20,000 bank customers who go online to get their financial statements," Schinella said. "We asked them questions about what they thought about the experience using Manilla. Forty-two percent say they were more satisfied by the experience." .FACEBOOK watch: Think Mutual Bank, Rochester, Minn..One problem with unleashing the marketing possibilities of Facebook is how to manage comments. Think Mutual Bank is smartly managing this potential liability. Guidelines for posting are expressly spelled out at the top of the bank's page. The bank screens comments and will delete any post that:.• Is profane, disparaging, harassing, obscene, defamatory, or threatening;.• Is off-topic, contains spam, is misleading or deceptive;.• Identifies individual Think Mutual Bank staff members by their full name;.• Violates any law or is in violation of someone else's copyright or intellectual property..This may seem like common sense but not all banks have launched their Facebook presence before developing thoughtful guidelines, and there is a lot to consider. Screening comments does come at the cost of transparency and may look too guarded. Should a bank censor a legitimate complaint from a customer? By announcing guidelines and screening posts, the bank might create the perception that nothing but positive reviews are welcome. Think Mutual is walking this line carefully and in the end produces a well-run Facebook page with clever inquiries and colorful photographs of bank activities, including the painting of a mural at a branch by local art school students and pictures of a very non-digital ad: a fully painted bus depicting common fish of Minnesota and one bus-sized northern pike. On the side of the bus it asks: "Fishing for a new bank?"